Wesley Law
For more than 20 years, Republican Rick Stream won every election he ran in. After serving in the Navy, he took a seat on the school board of his native Kirkwood, then spent four terms in the Missouri House of Representatives, rising to Budget Committee chair. But in 2014, Stream’s winning streak ended. He made a long-shot bid for St. Louis County executive and lost to Steve Stenger by just 1,812 votes out of 276,000 cast. A devout Presbyterian, Stream concluded that God didn’t want him to win that race, or a 2016 race for state Senate. Soon after that second loss, though, Stream found a home at the bipartisan St. Louis County Board of Elections, which he and Democrat Eric Fey now lead as co-directors—and there he plans to stay. “I’m not running anymore,” says Stream, now 71. “I’ve found a good spot to be in. It’s a perfect fit for me.”
What’s it like to run elections rather than run in them? It’s been a complete eye-opener, just the complexity of it. Even before Election Day, we “build” the election—make sure the right questions appear before the right voters. We go precinct by precinct, and we have 1,260 precincts. It’s a tremendous amount of work; I don’t think the public fully understands that. But I feel, at my advanced age, that I’m finally getting to do what I’ve always wanted to do, which is run a government office like a private business.
How so? Before I got here, we had 80 people on staff. When I arrived, we had 72. Now, we’re down to 60. It’s because we’re using a lot of automation and technology. And when people retire or leave, we ask the question any business would ask: Do we need to hire someone new, or can we split up the duties and distribute them to others? And about half the time, we think we can split up the duties. So [through all this] we’ve saved millions for taxpayers.
This year, Missouri will let any registered voter vote by mail, provided the voter applies for it and submits a notarized ballot. If that triggers a tidal wave of mail-in ballots, can the county handle it? Oh, sure. It’s going to be work for us, but we adapt. If we start getting large numbers of mail-in and absentee ballots, we’ll just work overtime, or we’ll bring in some bipartisan teams of temporary workers.
Have foreign actors tried or managed to hack into the election board’s IT infrastructure since 2016? We don’t have any evidence of that. In 2016, there were some attempts to intrude in voter registration in some states, but Missouri was not one of them. Our voting equipment is extremely safe: It’s never online—nobody can hack into it—and we get an electronic count and a manual count, so it’s the safest system you can devise at this point in time.
President Trump has claimed that in 2016, millions of people voted illegally and that’s why he lost the popular vote. Have you seen any evidence of voter fraud in St. Louis County? One person has recently been indicted for absentee ballot fraud in St. Louis County. As to people who are voting but shouldn’t be voting, we do know that clerks in some rural Missouri counties believe that non-citizens have registered. I have no idea if there are noncitizens registered in St. Louis County because it’s such a large county. When people register, that’s when they have to prove with some form of ID that they’re a U.S. born citizen or a naturalized citizen. We at the St. Louis County election board don’t handle 99.9 percent of registrations.
Ok, but do you have any indication of widespread irregularities at the places that process many registrations—drivers license offices, libraries, state agencies? Widespread, no. I would just say it’s a possibility simply because it’s happening in these rural counties.
We’re about to have an August primary and a November general election. What pandemic-related measures are you taking? We’ll have poll workers wearing gloves and masks. For the voters, we’ll have hand sanitizer and social distancing 6-foot strips and workers wiping down all the pens and styluses and surfaces with Clorox wipes. We cannot force the voters to wear masks, but we recommend them.
Is there a nightmare election scenario that keeps you up at night? No, but problems are going to occur, so we try to prepare for the worst. Suppose the voter registration system goes down. Well, we have printed-out rosters for every polling place. It takes longer, but we have that backup system. Also, we try to ensure we have technical teams out in the field, usually one for every four polling places so they can get to any of them within five minutes.
Conservatives get accused of wanting to suppress legitimate voting. You encourage legitimate voting. Why? It’s exciting for those of us who went off and served in the military and were willing to put our lives on the line… The freedoms we’ve been blessed with—those freedoms were fought for and defended in blood. A lot of us forget about that. I think it’s important for people to get out and vote, one way or another.
